Kipho film

Ghosts before breakfast

Hans Richter 1927 (Germany) 7 mins 16mm B&WIn 1916, German painter and graphic artist Hans Richter joined the Dada movement and asserted that the artist’s duty was to be explicitly political, opposing war and supporting the artistic avant-garde. Soon after co-founding the Association of Revolutionary Artists (Artistes Radicaux) in Zürich in 1919, he began intensive experimentation with film. Ghosts before breakfast is pure Dada – humorous, delightful, grotesque. Challenging bourgeois values, Richter presents a series of irrational happenings when ordinary objects defy their daily use: a bow-tie undoes itself, bowler hats leap from their owners’ heads and coffee cups leap to their destruction.

Inflation

Hans Richter 1928 2 mins 16mm B&WFrom 1921 to 1923, Germany suffered a significant period of hyperinflation. This film traces the rapid degradation of the US-German exchange rate, dramatically working towards the moment when it took 50 million marks to buy a single US dollar.

Everything turns, everything revolves

Hans Richter 1929 (Germany) 4 mins 16mm B&WHans Richter transforms a day at a Berlin carnival into a surreal, grotesque spectacle. Richter’s first sound film attracted the attention of Nazi officials who hated its modernism. The potent, high-speed, gun-loading sequence anticipates the sex-and-violence obsession of the 20th century.

Lightplay: Black, white, grey

László Maholy-Nagy 1930 (Germany) 5 min 16mm B&WLászló Moholy-Nagy filmed the shadow patterns created by his Light-space modulator, an early kinetic sculpture consisting of a variety of curved objects in a choreographed cycle of movements.